Posted
by
ScuttleMonkeyon Friday January 29, 2010 @03:12PM
from the ecstatic-twilight-fans dept.

pdragon04 writes to tell us that in recent tests a Howard Hughes Medical Institute team has found that through exposure to "young" blood cells, bone marrow stem cells start to act young again as well. "The researchers have not yet isolated the blood-borne factors that can switch old stem cells back to a more youthful state, but their results are consistent with other recent studies that show stem-cell aging may be reversible. Together those results suggest that it might one day be possible to boost the practical lifespan of stem cells, and thereby increase the body’s resistance to disease and age-related degeneration."

Except acting young again, does mean they stem cells
will have lost any genetic damage, that occurred though
aging. Perphaps some day though medicine will be
able to produce truely young stem cells, but that would
require checking that the DNA hasn't mutated from the
orignal young cell line.

Okay for the serious discussion. Obviously there's some chemical trigger involved to so the cells are responding more like young cells. It seems likely a drug could be developed that could delay age related disease. Immortality is likely an impossibility but delaying aging another decade or two would be massive. I'm starting to feel the effects of aging so getting ten years back even if it didn't extend life would be huge to me personally.

Science is necessary for medical treatments meaning saving and improving lives. Animals are not more important than humans and if X animals have to die so that countless human lives can be saved / horrible medical conditions can be treated so that their quality of life is better, then yes, it's a worthwhile trade off.

Your argument would have a point if we were talking about human testing against people's will (as was done during the Holocaust). However, since we're talking about animal testing, the ethics part doesn't fit in.